The SA Friends of the Beit Halochem Zahal Disabled Veterans Organisation was established in Johannesburg in 1982, its primary goal being to help and support Zahal disabled veterans by raising funds to help them return and resume their normal lives as soon as possible.

Generous Killarney Mall shoppers and retail sponsors have managed to collect one-years-worth of stationery for Thembelenkosini Care Givers in Soweto, part of an ongoing initiative to support the centre.

There’s a popular weekly satirical show in Israel called Eretz Nehederet. In a recent episode, an actor playing Benny Gantz, the former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and newcomer to Israeli politics, is asked how he’s feeling.

Devotion to the cause of the State of Israel flourishes in the most unlikely places, even in societies where the Jewish presence is small to non-existent. Such is the case in Mozambique, where the work of Beth-El Associacao Crista Amigos De Israel - Mozambican Christian Friends of Israel - testifies to how much can be achieved by those inspired by their Christian faith to promote the Israeli cause, despite adverse conditions.

JNF’s unique “Blue Boy Box” now lives at King David Linksfield Pre-Primary so that children of each generation learn the importance of tzedakah (charity or welfare). It is the responsibility of Jews all over the world to build Israel, develop it and nurture it as the home of the Jewish nation

“Knowledge is Light” was our school motto when I was a child in Durban. The importance of education was made clear to us from as far back as I can remember. It wasn’t taken for granted. A good education was a privilege.

How to fight terrorism while at the same time not encourage it is a challenge Israel continues to grapple with. Last Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that he was enacting the so-called “terrorist salaries law” for the first time. It allows Jerusalem to deduct from the monthly taxes it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) those monies it claims go towards terrorism.

(JTA) After the New England Patriots beat the favoured Kansas City Chiefs to reach their third straight Super Bowl – their amazing ninth in less than 20 years – CBS sports analyst Boomer Esiason made an intriguing statement, namely that Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

I can’t bear bullies! I know I am not alone in having a serious aversion to anyone or any group who tries to make themselves feel better by making others feel bad about themselves. I can’t stand people who push others around just because they are not able – for whatever reason – to stand up to them.

We have all heard the term before, and either flinched, cringed, or nodded our heads. The words “apartheid Israel” have become a term so often used in the discourse around Israeli-Palestinian conflict that we have somewhat lost our ability to think critically about its use.

With Prince William’s historic visit to Israel this week, all eyes have been trained on the Jewish capital. It may have taken 70 years, but the first official visit by a member of the British Royal family began in Israel on Monday, when William, the Duke of Cambridge, arrived in Tel Aviv.

Some 5 600 emissaries (shluchim) from Chabad-Lubavitch from all over the world gathered at the Pier 8 warehouse in Brooklyn, New York this week for the opening of their four-day annual international conference and banquet, 75 years after the arrival of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, from Europe.

It boggles the mind. Why is so much Torah-coverage given to the subject of an elaborate tent-structure called the tabernacle? The verses that relate to the tabernacle’s construction seem to go on and on. They fill not one, but four weekly portions.

“The greatness of our nation is that our people are great. We are a nation of heroes, of people with good and decent moral fibre who will not tolerate our country being plundered!” So said Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein in Pretoria this morning.“This is a struggle for accountability and justice,” Goldstein told the crowd (which included prominent Jewish CEOs like Adrian Gore, Stephen Koseff and Michael Katz). “This struggle is about sovereignty. The power of the people always triumphs in the end.”

The Jewish Report Editorial

The Jewish Report’s new digital leap

The launch of the Jewish Report’s new website this week, poses great opportunities for providing South African Jewry with a variety of modes - printed paper, website, smartphone, tablet, and more - for disseminating news and information, debating issues, and facilitating its members’ involvement.

by
GEOFF SIFRIN | Nov 20, 2013

The launch of the Jewish Report’s new website this week, poses great opportunities for providing South African Jewry with a variety of modes - printed paper, website, smartphone, tablet, and more - for disseminating news and information, debating issues, and facilitating its members’ involvement.

There will be coverage of the local scene, Israel and the world, from top journalists, columnists and bloggers, in written, video and audio formats.

We are following local and international media in keeping up with the latest technological advances. Newspapers are essentially becoming content providers for a variety of platforms, rather than a single platform as in the past, with implications for readership and advertising - the source of revenue.

The new developments, with much more content available from many more sources, also bring dangers regarding the sort of material carried. Over the 15 years since the Jewish Report was founded, we have jealously guarded its professionalism and integrity. Any newspaperman knows how much effort goes into making and sustaining a good newspaper. Readers for the most part take our quality and integrity for granted and rightly expect it.

The New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, in an interview in Ha’aretz this week, said that making a quality newspaper was like making a Swiss watch - you have to get it “just right”.

"If you are a Swiss watch company, you've got to be very careful about damaging the quality of the watch… (on the other hand) if you want to be a very cheap electronic watch company, it’s a different story, and your business model will be about selling millions and millions of watches.”

At the New York Times, he said: “We're in the Swiss watch business in journalism - very labour-intensive, beautifully made, high-quality journalism. And you've got to be careful that you don't ever mess with the watch - the core of it."

Between the two poles of the Swiss watch and the cheap electronic watch, where does the Jewish Report, as a community newspaper, fit in? In the direction of the former, we hope.

Traditional newspaper production, honed over well more than a century, produced certain ways of working, with its disciplines and values. Limitations on the paper’s size meant journalists had to be parsimonious in putting stories together, stripped of unnecessary adjectives and hyperbole.

The ABC of journalistic writing was “accuracy, brevity and clarity”. With the digital age, there is more leeway, with unlimited space. But “more is not always better”. People will not read a mass of grey reams of text. Ultimately, they look for quality, not quantity.

Journalistic issues such as libel and decency must still be respected. Even with so many contributors to the site’s content, it cannot become a free-for-all. How to moderate and control the site’s content becomes a major issue.

It is also important to remember that online journalism is real-time worldwide, as are its consequences, and the Internet is an unpoliced - and largely unpoliceable - space. Websites are continually vulnerable to hackers, whereas printed publications are much more secure and finite.

In the realities of this new era, most newspapers are still in learning mode, exploring different models for producing content and making money.

Contrary to the opinions of some media analysts, Thompson believes printed newspapers are not going to disappear, despite the move towards digital. For his company, the decline in printed paper readership had stabilised and "…we're going to go on printing the newspapers as long as people want us to, and the indications are that that will be for many more years to come".

At the Jewish Report, we are entirely dependent on advertising for our revenue. The sustainability of the printed paper and the website depends on revenue from advertising. Journalists, printers, distributors and other suppliers, have to be paid.

Sophisticated websites of major publications are manned by teams of dedicated specialists. With the Jewish Report’s much more limited resources, we are determined nevertheless to punch in the big league, and continue providing readers with the quality they have become accustomed to. This will obviously pose challenges and be a continuous learning curve. We are looking forward to the new challenges.